Markdown is a lightweight markup language for writing structured documents using ordinary plain text. Its syntax is intended to remain readable without processing, with punctuation characters indicating the document’s formatting.
Created by John Gruber with contributions from Aaron Swartz, Markdown was designed primarily for writing web content. The original Markdown distribution includes Markdown.pl, a text-to-HTML converter.
Markdown distinguishes between the format used for writing and the format used for publishing. Authors can prepare documents in a text editor, store them in version control and subsequently convert them to HTML. The original language deliberately covers a limited subset of HTML rather than attempting to reproduce its entire vocabulary.
Markdown’s syntax takes inspiration from conventions already familiar from plain-text email. Most formatting constructs are recognisable without a reference manual, although nesting lists, applying escaping rules and mixing HTML with Markdown require more care.
The original specification does not define every parsing detail. Consequently, independent implementations can produce different output from the same document. CommonMark addresses these ambiguities, while MultiMarkdown and GitHub Flavored Markdown introduce additional formatting capabilities.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- ATX-style headings using hash characters.
- Setext-style headings using underlining characters.
- Ordered and unordered lists with nested items.
- Emphasis and strong emphasis using asterisks or underscores.
- Inline code spans delimited by backticks.
- Indented code blocks preserving whitespace.
- Block quotations using greater-than characters.
- Inline links with optional titles.
- Reference-style links with separately defined destinations.
- Images with alternative text and optional titles.
- Automatic links for URLs and email addresses.
- Horizontal rules and explicit line breaks.
- Backslash escaping for punctuation with special meaning.
- Inline HTML for structures not covered by Markdown syntax.
- HTML and XHTML generation through the original converter.
Website: daringfireball.net/projects/markdown
Support:
Developer: John Gruber
License: BSD-style License
Related Software
| Lightweight Markup Languages | |
|---|---|
| Markdown | Markup language and Text-to-HTML conversion tool |
| MultiMarkdown | Based on Markdown with additional features |
| GitHub Flavored Markdown | For user content on GitHub.com and GitHub Enterprise |
| Markdown Extra | Lightweight markup language based on Markdown |
| AsciiDoc | Presentable text document format for writing articles |
| Textile | Billed as a "humane web text generator" |
| Texy | Text-to-XHTML formatter and converter library |
| Tome | Markup Language and Tool Suite for Authors |
| reStructuredText | Markup Syntax and Parser Component of Docutils |
| Haml | Templating engine for HTML |
| JsonML | Map between XML and JSON |
| TOML | Tom’s Obvious Minimal Language |
| Djot | Light markup language inspired by CommonMark |
| Org-mode | Plain text markup for notes, documents, and workflows |
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